Baptists on Present-Day Conditions
HERBERT S. JOHNSON, of Boston, in his address had the following testimony to bear with reference to conditions in the East. He asks: “What shall we expect in a country where one per cent of the people own ninety-nine per cent of its wealth? Such a condition uncorrected, such a tendency unrestrained, will bring us to the ash-dump of the world, where now rest Greece and Rome and Spain. Such centralization of wealth robs the churches, deprives them of influence, and bespeaks their fall. In my own city of Boston there are four or five great churches of national fame going to the wall because of the lack of money. Ten or twelve years more and the end will be at hand; Boston will be a private cemetery for Baptist churches, and the epitaph will be: ‘Died of Independence—Died of Individualism.’ Organization is the only corrective, the only hope, and must be accomplished by the Baptists.” And we know that conditions in the West are no better. San Francisco Facing Ruin
Said Dr. George Burlingame, of that city: “The Orient and Occident will fight their last battle in San Francisco; yet it is largely a pagan city. It is a state, a national, a world-wide matter. “Half of the population of 500,000 are pagan. It is a city tending toward destruction. In all the city there are but 16,000 Protestants. There are but 1,000 Baptists and many of them Finns, Russians, negroes, and Chinese. Emmanuel, our largest church, is in a moribund condition; buildings of the other four Baptist churches are in bad condition. Ours is a unique condition.”